The News Minute | August 14, 2014 | 06:31 pm IST
Renuka Kiran Shinde and her sister Seema Mohan Gavit may become the first women ever to be hanged in India after the President rejected their mercy petitions late last month, states a report by The Times of India.
The state department has now time till August 16 to inform all the concerned people, related to the convicts, about the final sentence.
The women, along with their mother Anjanabai Gavit were given a death sentence in 2001 for abducting thirteen children and killing nine of them. Anjanabai Gavit, however, passed away during the trial.
It is reported that the women used to kidnap these children and force them into begging. When they thought that the kids, aged between one and five years, had lost their utility, they would brutally murder them.
Several reports state that the women had a history of theft and pick pocketing before they begun their barbaric activities of kidnapping and killing children. Renuka was once caught stealing when one of her sons was with her. She then convinced the crowd that a woman with a child could not be a thief, and was let go. It is said that from there stemmed the idea in the minds of the women to use children as shields to guard them from their criminal activities.
Part of a 2012 report by The Week, that describes the monstrosity of the women, reads, “Seema once dropped a seven-month-old baby, Swapnil, because she could not deal with its incessant crying. In one instance, they hung a two-year-old boy upside down and slammed his head against a wall. “They chopped the body of one child and stuffed it into a gunny bag for disposal. The gang carried the bag with them and watched a movie at Alka Talkies in Kolhapur and ate bhel puri while the bag lay between their feet,” says Saroday, who was associated with the case in the Supreme Court.’
The sisters, who hailed from Kolhapur, were nabbed by the police in 1996.
In 2001, while giving the death sentence to the sisters, Judge G L Yedke in Kolhapur observed that the crimes by the women were of “the most heinous kind” and that they seemed to have enjoyed killing the children, adds the TOI report.
At present, both Renuka and Seema are lodged at the Yerwada jail in Pune.